Everything works including the card reader on the Aria case. I even experimented with the burner on the SATA port with the bridge adapter and it still worked fine.

Biggest issue was the Radeon 9700 Pro card which had problems with the default xorg driver. I got frequent hard locks when running the default open-source ATI driver. Didn't have this problem with some of the other distros I tried. I've also noticed the screen savers run much slower and even look different under Mint. Not sure what's up with that. After loading the current ATI proprietary 8.36.5 driver the system is pretty stable. EDIT: Works even better with XGL!

Network speed in and out of the Linux Mint box is slower than between my Windows machines. Linux says I have a gigabit connection, but I think it's running at 100 speed. Still, it connects and shares with my Windows boxes with minimal effort, which is more than I can say for some of the other distros I've tried.

I booted the Cassandra beta on a Sony VGN-C250N notebook and it ran great. Sony's 1280x800 LCD came up at the correct rez, and the networking seemed to be working (although I didn't test it thoroughly). The trackpad was fully functional, including functions like swiping up and down the side to scroll. Beryl ran great on the Sony.

I also tried it briefly on a Sony VGN-TXN15 and it seemd to run fine there as well. Didn't test all functions on the TXN, but Beryl ran nicely.

Without updates everything worked with 3.0 except the card reader. After updating HAL the card reader worked. With the 2.6.20-16 Generic Kernel, the DVD-+RW will not mount. I have removed the -16 Generic Kernel and now am going with the -15 Generic kernel only. Overall it works great!

I have installed Linux Mint Bianca KDE 2.2 and Cassandra 3.0 in my two laptops (HP Pavilion zt3050ea with no problems, everything went smoothly and HP Pavilion zv5180ea where I had to manually configure the WLAN - Broadcom bcm43xx). Great perfomance, Beryl working almost perfect.

With Bianca on the Sony, I had to tweak a /etc/modules to add tifm_sd for the built in card reader to work. With Cassandra, everything major worked out of the box. Well, the modem doesn't work, and I won't pay for a the modem driver. The video out toggle Fn key doesn't work, nor do the brightness or sleep keys. Everything else works. I'm pleased.

With Cassandra on the Acer, everything tested works. Not tested were modem and Fn keys. Again, I'm pleased.

I haven't tried the Hauppauge tuner under Linux yet, but everything else works great. I run a local gigabit network with 3 other computers through a D-Link router. Network speed is slower in Linux than Windows. Haven't tried to trouble-shoot that yet.